My Neighbor Totoro 1988

[8.4/10] (Note: This review is of the Disney dub.) So much of My Neighbor Totoro is slow and deliberate. It is a sumptuous film, largely content to let its audience enjoy the slice of idyllic life it presents in wondrous tones. It takes time to let us see the Kusakabe family unpacking and settling into their new home and for Satsuki and Mei to wait for their father in the rain, without hurrying either. It wants us to feel the time pass, to revel in the quiet and leisurely moments of rural splendor and domesticity. Everything here moves at its own pace.

And then it doesn’t. The power of the film’s final act comes from that contrast. After so much unhurried living and gentle vignettes, writer-director Hayao Miyazaki’s story explodes with urgency in the shadow of a sick parent and a lost child. There are no confrontations here, no villains or fistfights to clinch the climax of the film. Instead, there’s a well of pent up fear and intensity, bubbling under the surface all this time, that be restrained no longer. Those expressions of anxiety and longing soon become more piercing and blood-pumping than any pugilistic showdown.

What unites both parts is not only a unity of emotion, but also utterly gorgeous artwork and animation. Outside of a couple of vaguely unsightly character designs, My Neighbor Totoro is a feast for the eyes. Miyazaki and his design team offer up beautiful landscape after beautiful landscape. There’s a watercolor feel to the invitingly verdant flora surrounding the Kusakabe farm, from the shrubbery that flows in the wind to the towering camphor tree that watches over their family. In sunset and twilight, the animators leave each image awash in color, as soothing hues fade into one another amid a rural paradise.

But as well as the movie does at representing an idealized version of real life sky and soil, it does even better in the imaginative creatures and fantasies it conjures. The titular totoros -- big fluffy feline pudges -- hop and lurch and float with a lumbering grace, with big eyes, toothy grins, and bulbous but huggable forms that welcome our heroes into their wonderland. Puffy soot spirits swarm and cluster and disappear with movements that are half-insect and half-force of nature. A cheshire-like cat bus bounds invisibly over hill and dale, using its too many limbs to leap with balletic grace and fluffy comfort. Rising branches and enchanted spindletops keep the movie’s imaginative corners as vibrant and full of life as its more down-to-earth visuals.

What keeps the fantasy and the reality glued together are Satsuki and Mei. It’s remarkable how much the two of them genuinely feel like little kids in this movie, not just the junior comedians or all-too-perfect children who show up so often in family movies. They run around and scream. They are loud and occasionally obstinate. The turn on a dime from being joyous to being scared to erupting with laughter. There’s a vibrance and truth to each of them, that provides a foundation when the movie turns from imaginative play to more serious worries.

The Disney dub in particular benefits from having real life sisters Dakota and Elle Fanning play the on-screen sisters. It lends an air of lived-in plausibility to their dynamic, at once playful, helpful, and sometimes frustrated. Their experiences, in trying to look after one another, play with one another, and support one another, are the heart of the film. That the connection feels so real is subtly My Neighbor Totoro’s greatest strength.

It’s so much fun to see them summon billowing trees or float above the field with their magical animal companions in tow. It’s so warm to see the two girls interact with their endlessly patient, unfailingly encouraging father or the wise and gentle “granny” next door. It’s so familiar to see them shift from wild horsing around to sisterly annoyance to sibling love. For some time, My Neighbor Totoro looks like it’s just going to be a series of vignettes, a “scenes on the farm” mood piece more than a story. And I’d be hard-pressed to complain if it were just that, given the sweetness and splendor of those sketches.

But their flights of imagination, accepted and fed by the adults around them, mask something darker underneath -- the emotional struggles of being a young child with a sick parent. At times, My Neighbor Totoro calls to mind later works like Pan’s Labyrinth where a young girl processes difficult family circumstances in fantastical tones, or Life Is Beautiful where grown-ups turn a harrowing experience for a little boy into an inventive game that masks the hardship around.

Miyazaki never belabors the struggles that Satsuki and Mei are going through given their hospital-ridden mom, or the extra care and leeway they receive from their dad and other kindly adults who look after them. It just slowly emerges in the girls’ choice to wait dutifully at the bus for their father, to imagine ways they can make time and nature move faster, to conjure a spirit world that will look after them and their family in the midst of something that feels uncontrollable. Whether or not these occurrences are “real” within the world of the film is beside the point -- they represent that effort to cope with such difficulties at an age when they’re barely understood.

That’s what gives the film such power when the news comes that their mother’s received bad news from the doctor and will have to stay at the hospital longer, prompting Mei to declare that it isn’t fair and run away. Suddenly this steady movie kicks into overdrive. Everyone is suddenly more frantic. Satuski races at what seems like an impossible speed. She rumbles through the enchanted pathway and begs Totoro for help as the catbus whisks her through the rolling hills toward her little sister.

So much to this point has been kept at bay. The effort to keep things normal, to not be afraid, to hope for something good to come, to look after your loved ones, causes an unseen strain. When something big comes along to dislodge it, what’s been held inside comes spilling out, and all that energy and emotion comes with it. There is genuine terror in the climax of the film, as we fear what may happen with Mrs. Kusakabe, and whether Satsuki will find Mei, with the unthinkable possibilities that secretly loomed over the movie from the beginning are made manifest.

And yet, it’s also why there’s such catharsis when Satsuki identifies the sandal floating in the pond as belonging to to someone other than her sister, and when she finds Mei, with the help of a leaping catbus and her friendly “troll” of a neighbor, assured that her preteen frustrations did not scare her only sibling off somewhere dangerous. It’s why there is such relief when the movie slows down again, to show Mr. and Mrs. Kusakabe speaking easily with one another about how this is a minor setback and how they’ll all be together at home soon enough.

It is all a reassurance that the winsome old farmhouse and the love that radiates from within it to the flora and fauna that surround it can still be sustained and enjoyed. The movie begins with our unhurried glimpses of that idyllic life. It lets loose the childhood and grown-up anxieties that throw that paradise into jeopardy. And finally, it restores the pastoral wonderland and familial affection that makes My Neighbor Totoro seem so gentle and inviting, with the thought so tragic that it could ever, so suddenly, slip away.